Category: London

This article was first published (without images) in The Courtauldian. Leighton House Museum’s latest exhibition is a commemoration of a promised gift to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from one of the most significant private collections in North America. The group of eighty drawings was collected by Dr Dennis T. Lanigan, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon whose fascination…

Greco-Roman sculpture has always been a source of intrigue for generations of artists, collectors, connoisseurs, and even tourists. The Venus de Milo in the Museé du Louvre is one of the most popular exhibits and has been a symbol of ideal female beauty and sophisticated taste for many art critics over the years. When the…

Two years ago the Griffin Gallery in West London launched its first Griffin Art Prize competition for UK-based artists who graduated within the past five years. The winner of the prize is awarded a six-month residency at the Griffin Gallery and Studios, resulting in a solo exhibition at the gallery with a published catalogue. They…

Over the weekend the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden launched its annual contemporary arts festival Deloitte Ignite, now in its seventh year, with a series of free public events. The month-long festival (5th-28th September 2014) brings together dance and the visual arts, leading to a collaboration between the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery’s…

An artist sits in a wheelchair, a large pair of scissors in one hand, the other holding on to a large sheet of orange paper. Aided by his studio assistant, the Russian-born Lydia Delectorskaya, the great Henri Matisse swiftly and rapidly cuts the piece of paper into a wavy, algae-like form. Similar shapes are then…

It has been roughly 3 hours since I left Marina Abramović’s 512 Hours show at the Serpentine Gallery in London and I am still out of breath. The experience was incredibly surreal and everyone will have varying responses, evidenced by the exhibition’s Participant Chronicles on Tumblr. I went with a friend from university, Maria, and…

I recently attended a concert at the Water Rats in London headlined by UK country-duo The Shires. This was the penultimate leg of their UK tour. Supporting them on tour was Jersey-based Frankie Davies. To my surprise, Gary Quinn from Ireland was also performing at that particular concert. It was fun-filled night of promoting British country…

Dear readers. How often do you look carefully at the buildings portrayed in paintings? How many times have you focused on the painted surroundings more than the figures in the image? For the majority of you, “very little” is likely to be your response. Building the Picture attempts to reverse this, forcing us to look…

What is ‘painting’? A general dictionary definition of the term might be along the lines of “a process of applying paint to a surface for artistic effect”. In the world of contemporary art, this term has gained a significant amount of leeway, substituting paint for alternative media. The GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design…

Drawing many a crowd to one of London’s busiest squares, two world-famous paintings by none other than the Dutch Impressionist Vincent van Gogh have been reunited in Room 46 of the National Gallery for the first time in 65 years. The reunion was made possible by the friendship between the National Gallery and the Van…

If there was only one word to describe the works in this exhibition, it would be this: big. The National Gallery’s Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice brings together 50 paintings by the wonderful Paolo Veronese in the UK’s first ever monographic exhibition of the artist. And boy, did they do an impressive job! Unfaithfulness and…

Architecture isn’t always everyone’s cup of tea, and neither is installation art. Personally, reading about architecture bores me – there’s just something about not being in the architecture itself that irritates me. The inability to feel the space described. And this is exactly what Sensing Spaces is about: feeling. Li Xiaodong’s timber forest. Own photograph.